Danh Vō was born in Bà Rịa, Vietnam in August 1975. After the Communists' victory and the fall of Saigon, the Vo family and 20,000 other South Vietnamese were brought in 1975 to the island of Phú Quốc. in 1979, when he was 4 years old, his family fled South Vietnam in a homemade boat and was rescued at sea by a freighter belonging to the Danish Maersk shipping company. The family members settled in Denmark. Their assimilation into European culture and the events that led up to their flight from Vietnam are reflected in Vō's art, which juxtaposes the historical and the personal. When Danh Vo and his family were registered by the Danish authorities, the family name Vo was placed last. His middle name, Trung, was recorded as his first name. Vō moved to Berlin in 2005, after finishing school at Städelschule in Frankfurt, where he went after quitting painting at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He had residencies at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles and at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris. He lives in both Berlin and Mexico City.
Work
Vo's installations, which are composed of documents, photos and appropriations of works of other artists, often address the issues of identity and belonging. The conceptual work Vo Rosasco Rasmussen involves the artist's marriage to and immediate divorce from a growing list of important people in his life; after each marriage, Vō retains the last name of his former spouse. His official name is now Trung Ky Danh Vo Rosaco Rasmussen. Oma Totem, a stacked sculpture of his grandmother's welcome gifts from a relief program on her arrival in Germany in the 1980s, displays her television set, washing machine, and refrigerator, among other items. For 2.02.1861, the artist asked his father Phung Vo to transcribe the last communication from the French Catholic Saint Théophane Vénard to his own father before he was decapitated in 1861 in Vo's native Vietnam; although multiple copies of the transcribed letter exist, the total number will remain undefined until Phung Vo's death. In Autoerotic Asphyxiation, Vō presents documentary pictures of young Asian men taken by Joseph Carrier, an American anthropologist and counterinsurgency specialist who worked in Vietnam for the RAND Corporation from 1962 to 1973. While in Vietnam, Carrier privately documented the casual interactions he observed, intimate without necessarily being homoerotic, between local men; he produced a substantial photographic archive, which he subsequently bequeathed to Danh Vō. For his project We the People, created between 2010 and 2012, Vo enlisted a Shanghai fabricator to recast a life-size Statue of Liberty from 30 tons of copper sheets the width of just two pennies. Rather than assemble the approximately 300 sections, the artist shipped the giant elements to some 15 sites around the world after they rolled off the production line in China. From mid May to early December 2014 We the People was shown in New York City under the auspices of the Public Art Fund, with its assembly of parts shared between City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge Park in the borough of Brooklyn. While the work was being installed in City Hall Park, a few of its pieces - replicas of the chain links found at the feet of the original Statue of Liberty - were stolen. For a 2013 show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Vo conceived a homage to the artist Martin Wong. The installation consists of nearly 4,000 frequently small artworks, artifacts and tchotchkes that once belonged to Wong, crowded into a specially designed gallery lined with laminatedplywood shelves. The show's title—I am you and you are too—appeared on Wong's business cards and stamps. Another 2013 show at New York's Marian Goodman Gallery focused on the personal effects of the late U.S. Secretary of DefenseRobert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War. Looking to open up a dialogue about shared and private histories, Vō displayed or modified 14 items acquired at a Sotheby's auction—including the pen used to the sign the Gulf of Tonkin memo and a 1944 photograph by Ansel Adams.
In 2014, Dutch collector and entrepreneur Bert Kreuk filed a suit against Vō, claiming that the artist agreed in January 2013 to produce one or more new works for Kreuk’s exhibition, Transforming the Known, at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, and that the work would be acquired by the collector after the show. Before the exhibition opened in June 2013, Vō sent an existing work, Fiat Veritas, a cardboard box marked with gold leaf. However, Kreuk said the agreement had been for Vō to create a new work for his collection, expressing a preference for the artist’s large-scale Budweiser and American Flag series. In June 2015, a Rotterdam court upheld Kreuk’s claim and ordered the artist to create a new artwork for the collector within a year. In July 2015, Vō proposed to answer the court ruling by producing a site-specific wall work, as large as Kreuk wished, with the text "Shove it up your ass, you faggot"; subsequently, his legal team reached a settlement and the collector dropped the suit.
